1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally concerns pipelined analog to digital (A/D) conversion in which is performed noisy digital to analog (D/A) conversion, and pipelined analog to digital (A/D) converters internally incorporating noisy digital to analog (D/A) converters.
The present invention particularly concerns noise, and more particularly noise due to component mismatch, occurring in A/D conversion and in A/D converters—particularly as are used in D/A conversion and converters—and the abatement and/or cancellation of this noise.
2. Description of the Prior Art
2.1 General Background
It is known that digital-to-analog converters (DACs) and analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) have systemic sources of noise, and that these noise sources can sometimes be abated, or canceled.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,684,482 for SPECTRAL SHAPING OF CIRCUIT ERRORS IN DIGITAL-TO-ANALOG CONVERTERS to the selfsame inventor Galton as is the present invention concerns a general digital-to-analog (DAC) topology that spectrally shapes the DAC conversion noise caused by analog circuit mismatches. In particular, certain highly practical first-order and second-order noise-shaping DACs that are special cases of a general topology are taught. The topology extends the practicality of using noise-shaping DACs in ΔΣ data converters. A first-order DAC shown in the patent is at least as hardware efficient as previously known DACs, but offers the advantage that it is amenable to a simple dithering technique capable of eliminating spurious tones. A second-order DAC shown in the patent is more hardware efficient than previously known DACs, and generally has a large spurious-free dynamic range without any dithering. DACs with other types of noise-shaping characteristics (e.g., bandpass noise-shaping characteristics) may be designed based on general DAC topology.
2.2 Specific Background
Unlike other types of noise in a conventional pipelined analog to digital converter (ADC), noise introduced by a first-stage digital to analog converter (DAC) that is within the ADC is not attenuated or canceled along the pipeline, so it tends to be the dominant contributor of overall ADC error. See S. H. Lewis and P. R. Gray, “A pipelined 5-Msample/s 9-bit analog-to-digital converter,” IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits, vol. SC-22, no. 6, pp. 954–961, December 1987. See also S. Sutarja and P. R. Gray, “A pipelined 13-bit 250-ks/s 5-V analog-to-digital converter,” IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits, vol. 23, no. 6, pp. 1316–1323, December 1988.
In typical switched-capacitor implementations, most of this DAC noise arises from static capacitor mismatches. With present VLSI circuit technology it is difficult to match capacitors to better than 0.1%. This translates into an A/D conversion limit of about 11 bits in pipelined ADC architectures not having some form of error cancellation.